SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION IN A NUTSHELL.

First, foremost and absolutely crucial: The optimization will be based on the keywords and key phrases you eventually decide to use and your site's future rank will consequently depend on them to 95%.

Therefore, don't for a minute think that you can scribble down the most advantageous words/phrases for your site (from now on called W/P) during a coffee break. Instead, you need days or weeks to produce and edit a quality list that's optimal and that isn't too extensive. Maybe 20-50 W/P will be OK.

While doing this, consider e.g. various ways to spell a word (optimization and optimisation), to use one or two words (webdesign or web design), different vocabulary (sidewalk and pavement, french fries and chips) or locally used brand names (Wolksvagen Golf or Wolksvagen Rabbit), and not least the names of locations, districts, provinces and similar that people might use in their search.

When done, bear in mind that you might not need all those W/P in every single page if you have several.

WRITING THE TEXTS

Take plenty of time to write the copy (text) for your site. Of course, you need to write it as well as possible as you would do with any text, e.g. correct spelling, a proper structure, logical and captivating.

While you commonly should keep commercial texts in advertisements and brochures as short as possible (KISS = Keep It Short & Simple), the opposite goes for a website that you want to achieve good ranking. Search engines (SE) love content, so don't be afraid to write quite a lot of text and to spread the content over several pages if possible.

But also start dropping the W/P from your list into the text. The sooner in the text they appear, the better.

OPTIMIZING PAGE ELEMENTS

• Give each page a unique, describing title. Not "Welcome to John Doe's Web Site" but "John Doe's Red Bicycles", assuming "red bicycles" is included among your W/P.
• Save the html with a proper file name, e.g. not "page1.html" but rather "red_bicycles.html".
• If you have different subdirectories, name them with proper words from your W/P list.
• Use the W/P in <h> tags. Preferably, if you can use the same words as in the title of the page. <h1> is more important than the <h2> tag, which is more important than the <h3> tag and so on.
• Put the text you wrote inside <p> tags.
• Name image files with W/P. Instead of "image001.jpg" make it "red-bicycle.jpg".
• Use W/P in image title and alt texts.
• Name links with W/P. Instead of "Read more here!", name the link "More about our red bicycles here!". If that makes your nav bar grow bigger - so be it. It's not only better for your SE rank, but also easier for the user if you provide exact info where a link leads.
• Remember that SEs will read javascript links, but not likely follow them. Therefore, if you rely on javascript links, make sure you have regular html links to the same pages, too, maybe inside noscript tags.
• And here is the killer: Make "quality" sites link to yours.
  "Quality" sites are sites with roughly the same content as yours, or operated by someone who is in the same business. A photographer will benefit from links in a film manufacturer's site, etc.
  But "quality" also means sites with already excellent ranking or with lots of visitors or with incoming links from other sites.
  What "quality" does NOT mean is those link swapping sites that have no other purpose than to offer - links.
• This isn't something you should rely on, but it's nice to know: Google has started using some kind of OCR software to identify texts in images in the same way they read and index text in e.g. pdf files. The usage of this feature might not be very extensive, but you can actually find sites on the web this way, too. To check it out in another context, take a look at Google's Catalog register.
• Finally, put the W/P in "keyword" and "description" meta tags, unique for each page if possible. They're not very important any more because some web designers previously used them to cheat the search engines.
  But it doesn't hurt to have them there, and when they actually match the page's content, they will add some extra value. When adding the keywords, don't use any comma between them and try to organize them in phrases.

SUBMITTING TO GOOGLE

The only truly free major search engine is Google to which you submit your site here. (The other SEs are trying to charge. See further down) Be prepared to wait. And wait. And wait...

Your site might show up within a few days and then disappear again for no obvious reason after a week. This goes in particular for sites with new domain names that haven't been indexed before and it might take as long as 2-6 months before it shows up again.

But whatever you do, don't start submitting the site again until after at least four months, because you might even prolong the indexing further.

No one really knows for sure about this. But Google launched a kind of "quarantine" in May 2004, and the SE community soon started calling it for "sandboxing", i.e. your site is placed in the sandbox a while before it'll be allowed to play with the big boys.

If you like to know more, do a Google (!) for e.g. "google sandbox".

AVOIDING THE GOOGLE "SANDBOX":

If your domain name is brand new, you want the site need to be indexed and listed by Google right away, and you can't hang around for it to eventually escape the sandbox (see above), then you might have to consider buying a second hand domain name instead of using the new domain you just registered.

The reason is that older domain names have likely already been in the sandbox and have now been granted absolution by Google. Hence, the new content that you are adding to the domain will be indexed and listed within a couple of days, and it's very unlikely that the site will disappear to the sandbox again.

Prices for used domains varies a lot. From about US$ 100-500 for names that aren't very catchy to US$10-12,000 for better ones. It's not rare that some of the best are open for bids as in auctions instead of having fixed prices.

One of the main domain name brokers is sedo.com. But also look at what others might offer. Check e.g. DMOZ.org or Yahoo Directory.

SUBMITTING TO "THE OTHERS"

If you want to have your site included in the other SEs for free, there must be a link pointing to your site somewhere in another site that is already indexed by respective SE.

Thus, the SE will eventually follow that link and index your site too, but this might also take several months and is probably delayed that way since they rather want you to pay and be included within a few days.

PAYING FOR SUBMISSION

If you don't mind paying to be included in the other SEs, there are several programs you can go for, e.g. Overture. By doing that, you will be included within a few days.

DIRECTORIES

By far, the most important directory is dmoz.org. Go there, find the most appropriate category(-ies) for your site, and submit. It's free, but the directory is managed by volunteers that are checking each site manually (or rather ocularly) before it'll be included. Sometimes, these guys are crumbling under a pretty hefty work load, so it might take several months before your site is included.

Bearing in mind that many, many other directories simply grab their content from dmoz, it is still a good idea to search for other directories your site might fit into. Check if there are some local sites with directories, or of there are directories for specific businesses.

However, some SE:s like e.g. Yahoo also have a directory. If you're running a commercial site, consider this as an option. It's usually not free, but a few hundred US dollars annually. But being present in them might boost your business a lot and my guess is that a site that registered in the directory will be available in the SE much faster (and might even rank higher?). Plus the obvious advantage: people will have yet another way to find your business.

OTHER MEANS

Check out Google's AdWords program. It's where those little ads to the right of a result page in Google comes from. The brilliance with the program is that you decide where and how your ads will show up, and how much it'll cost you.

WARNINGS AND HINTS

• Whatever you do, don't try to fool the SEs by e.g. adding hidden layers jammed with W/P or other obvious cheats to improve your rank. They have seen every trick in the book, and may simply exclude you if they dislike your "creativity".
• Some people are claiming e.g. cloaking to be safe and refers to their own sites as examples. I wouldn't dare trying, though.
• Never use "submit services" offering to submit your site to 2,000 or so search engines.
  1) because these 2.000 "engines" likely pick sites from the major ones anyway.
  2) because few people actually use them.
  3) you'll get tons of spam since many are NOT search engines but rather some kind of mailing lists.
  4) they can't submit your site to the SEs that are charging anyway (unless they pay, that is. Which I doubt they will...).
• SEs will index up to about 100-110Kb of code per page - max. Since Google has started to index images, it's likely that images are included in those figures. Therefore, you have yet another reason for keeping your pages lean and small.
• Never use any software like e.g. Web Position Gold or Advanced Web Ranking to check the rank. Doing so will violate the SEs terms of service due e.g. extraordinary bandwidth consumption and the SEs might very well penalize the site by simply kicking it out.
• Carefully study these two pages at Google: For webmasters and their general guidlines.
• If you are taking away pages that are already listed in SEs, it means that the user will end up staring at a 404, which isn't very popular and will likely create some irritation.
  Remedy: Contact your host and ask if you can do a custom made 404 page. If so, put a regular link in it's body and a meta refresh tag in the head of it, pointing to your home page.

BOTTOM LINE

SEO takes time, more time and then some extra time and you will never be finished since there will always be something you can improve. You may have to wait up to 4-6 months before your site shows up at all. If the rank isn't the best, you might need to start tweaking and testing new W/P, which will take several months again. Just hang in there and don't give up. Good luck!

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

You can read more at these links:

Search Engine World
SpiderFood
SearchEngine Showdown
Taming The Beast
SEO-Pro

For discussions about SEs, go to:
WebMaster World
Web Workshop

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